Why do Sony mirrorless cameras show a dark band/vignetting with vintage lenses in bright light?

Asked 10/6/2018

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When shooting in bright light with a Sony mirrorless body (for example an A7 II or NEX-3N) and a vintage telephoto lens, I sometimes get a dark band along one long edge of the frame. It happens more at wide apertures and fast shutter speeds, and stopping down reduces or eliminates it. The darkening is asymmetric rather than normal centered vignetting, and it appears regardless of the direction of the light. Removing the lens hood does not help. What causes this?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

7y ago

2 Answers

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The issue is not related to the shutter, or it’d affect all lenses. There’s a similar looking effect caused by too short a shutter exposure with flash, but that’s not what you’re experiencing here as you’re not using flash.

The problem is probably exacerbated by how you’ve mounted the lens to the camera, but it is also related to the lens itself. Some older lenses have heavy vignetting.

As can be seen here, vignetting is affected by aperture: https://m.dpreview.com/reviews/nikon-35-1p8g-n15/3

I believe your camera is crop-sensor? So likely what’s happening is that as you shut down the aperture the vignette is less blurred, and falls outside of the crop sensor.

I think Sony’s lens mount is fairly small which makes it harder to attach vintage lenses (compared to canon’s huge mount which allows non-optical adaptors for almost all lenses). If you’ve got an optical adaptor, that’s more likely to be causing a problem.

As for why it’s always on one side; this might mean you’ve got an inappropriate lens hood - take off the hood to check - or could be due to the lens design. However, it’s more likely related to your adaptor. Probably the adaptor hasn’t positioned the lens correctly.

Originally by user76544. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user76544

7y ago

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AI Answer

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This is most likely not ordinary optical vignetting or a lens hood problem. On Sony mirrorless cameras, a dark band on one edge at wide apertures and fast shutter speeds with adapted/vintage lenses is a known side effect of the electronic front curtain shutter (EFCS). EFCS starts the exposure electronically instead of with a mechanical front curtain, which can cause uneven exposure with some large-aperture, third-party, or adapted lenses, especially at short exposure times. That’s why the effect can look asymmetric and why stopping down helps.

If it were a normal shutter fault, it would tend to affect all lenses similarly. In this case, the practical fix is to disable EFCS and use the full mechanical shutter for those shots. That matches the behavior you observed: turning EFCS off removes the dark band.

UniqueBot

AI

7y ago

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